Will humans become bionic? - BBC Click

[Music] this week the cyborgs are coming the eyeborgs are watching the bar staff are serving and Laura photographs of banana [Music] this is Adam Jensen star of the video game Deus Ex Human Revolution set in 2027 the poor chap has to undergo extensive cybernetic modifications after being severely injured well just ten years before those events might occur that plotline doesn't seem that far off for years now people have been body hacking giving themselves extra abilities and as our understanding of robotics has advanced so is our creativity meet Rob Spence like the cyborg in the video game he too has a bionic eye it doesn't have Terminator vision like this yet but it does record video inside a prosthetic eye which is an odd shape they're not a sphere a prosthetic eye they're actually like a very thick contact lens and inside that is a battery a video camera and a video transmitter all attached to a circuit board so they can talk to one another the camera is turned on and off with a magnet it doesn't look at all comfortable is it in any way comfortable yes I know it looks uncomfortable well the first iteration that looks the most uncomfortable it looks like a 90s iMac you could see all the goods inside like the battery in the wires but that's covered by smooth plastic that you know so it's not a thing I don't have like open wires and batteries you know I cut it made my stomach drop a little bit when I saw that robbed damaged his eye when he was 9 and in 2009 began exploring the idea of a bionic eye as a filmmaker himself he was fascinated with the idea that his I could become a camera it's like an absurd toy for a one-eyed moaning I used to watch the bionic man when I was a kid the Six Million Dollar Man I had I had the the action figures you look through the back of his head through his bionic eye I was looking at my Nokia flip phone at the time I was like this was pretty small and that's in fact who I called I called Nokia and they said well we call the Cameron module people in China and so this is how you you begin these things it's very small it's very challenging we in fact used analog technology it does visual drop outs which is the visual language of all video from the future including Princess Leia Hassan Grover one tells everyone this is analog yeah since the initial prototype Rob and his engineers have gone through several upgrades he now has one eye that glows red when it films and another camera eye that looks a bit more normal I get calls from emails from moms whose kid has just lost an eye because it's some sort of fun thing to show a kids maniac running around on videos and glowing red eye cameras and stuff it's fun for them to love that they're now working on ways to transfer the technology to other people's prosthetic eyes we're doing 3d scans of those now and then that creates a space that you can take into software to map on the technology that we're increasingly able to reproduce some people Gulf I like make fake eye cameras and you know film things with it actively dye board now right that's the I upgraded now let's do the rest of the body is Dave Lee at MIT in Boston MIT Media Lab is home to some of the most innovative tech research in the world but there's one room here I find particularly fascinating the mission of this lab is probably one of the most important goals of our time they're trying to essentially eradicate disability they want to make it so that if you lose a limb it won't have any impact on your quality of life and they're making incredible progress so we work on everything from creating new motors and designs for ankles and knees and artificial joints all the way to you know marrying these by electronic devices with the human body through novel neural interfacing method evidence of this work can be seen with people like Ryan cannon complications after a broken leg left him needing an amputation what's special about his new robotic leg is that it's doing something the human body can do instinctively but is extremely complex to engineer the motor is able to work in such a way that simulates a real biological ankle joint the biome uses onboard sensors to infer whether the leg is for example in the air on the ground and perform actions that to the person feel much more like real walking when they would get from a passive processes so amputees I Ryan such innovations are life-changing I can move in a more rhythmic symmetrical way and being able to move in that manner allows me to walk at a faster pace for a longer distance and to do more activities during the day this is not relying just on straight physics and mechanical design it's relying on computing power not all of the research here is about solving disability this exoskeleton project is about augmenting humans it allows the body to use much less energy when running walking it improves your ability to walk by 25% so what that means is if you were to walk 100 miles it would only feel to you like you walk 75 we're able to do that today right and those are devices that I would expect is rolling out commercially in the next several years and we're already beginning to see this kind of technology deployed into the real world US retail chain Lowe's is experimenting with kicking out its staff with exoskeletons designed in Virginia which could give their employees more stamina at work with this in mind the lab at MIT is now looking to the next huge question how close are we to the point where people might actually want these kind of prosthetics instead of their real limbs I definitely think that we are entering an age in which the line between biological systems and synthetic systems is going to be very much blurred but what might be some of the drawbacks of having these additions to the human body as there's widespread uptake that they might only be available to people who have the financial ability to pay for them welcome to the week in tech it was a week a group of disgruntled Twitter users began suing President Donald Trump for blocking them on Twitter Facebook announced its try link instead of advertising in its message it up yeah that'll go down well with users and step aside side with Kalifa featuring Charlie foots see you again has taken the coveted crown of most-watched YouTube pick it's been viewed as staggering which is 2.9 billion times billionaire Elon Musk launched the new all-electric Tesla Model 3 for the price tag of $35,000 it's supposed to be more affordable than Tesla's previous efforts which have cost up to 100 grand rival electric automobile company Faraday future for scrapped its plans to build a billion-dollar factory in the US state of Nevada this leaves a big question mark for the next year's launch of the company's FF 91 car no it's not a digital version of the Ministry of Silly Walks but google's deepmind artificial intelligence attempting to learn how to walk so far the research is being conducted in virtual environments but it could one day help robots learn how to navigating complex or unfamiliar spaces and finally former NASA scientist built a super-sized Super Soaker which can fire a jet of water at 272 miles an hour see is it's so big at least you'll see incoming if there's beard that's where it says fashion style outfit a few sometimes it's not that easy to put into words what you want to search for online and that's why companies are working on ways of us being able to take a simple picture and then search using that image Pinterest is a place all about images and ideas they've had a form of visual search for a couple of years now allowing you to focus in on a particular object within a picture through a combination of image recognition and the data points attached to that image including the hundreds of thousands of swords it may have been into it could select similar images this January they upped their game though launching Pinterest Len a way of being able to search through a photo with no other data attached and from that search term it aims to come up with similar object and related ideas there we go we've got picture my something is emerging it's a shoes right so definitely shoes but they don't exactly resemble mine flashing with blue lasers for men's shoes so how does it actually do this say there are two parts of visual search the first is computer vision which is a way of translating the information coming in through the camera into words and the second is the data set and the data set is the most important and so with Pinterest lens when you point your camera at something in the real world the computer inside the phone translates that image into text and then it takes the text and it takes the image and runs a search against all hundred billion pins on Pinterest to find the ones that seem the most relevant okay it knows it's 11 that's definitely a good start as we scroll down okay I think you scroll through it and some of the results make sense which is sort of like when you search for words because also when you search for them and a lot of the things don't make sense and some do I haven't come up with those words I've got a series of recipes that contain lemons we've got a lemon drizzle cake a lemon polenta cake we've now got some artwork of lemons a lot better than it did on my booth and that's probably because this is a very simple image to recognize and understand Pinterest lens is also powering vision the image search function in Samsung bixby which is currently only available on f8 phoned in the US and career and so today we are announcing a new initiative called Google and Google lended also due for release soon the company says it'll be a new way of the computer being able to see and even act by its surroundings whilst you're talking to your Google assistant also working in this space is a chatot called glam ik which is a way of photographing any item that you like sending it to them via facebook messenger and receiving a response that should tell you where you can buy a similar item let's give this a go on my boots to start with it works with pictures found on Instagram or your phone eventually allowing you to narrow down results based on price brackets brands and retailers ok this isn't a bad start the bot uses artificial intelligence machine learning and what it calls content based image recognition to search without the need for tags as well as shopping for individual items it aims to be able to help recreate a whole look making clicking through two items so easy is of course amazing for retailers but also if you're lacking in inspiration so if someone's harder to buy and they're wearing something you really like you need to be quick process having spent a while testing both the results with sometimes surprisingly accurate and other time kind of questionable but it is early day and the more this sort of technology is used for more data it collects and the more reliable the results become that's underwear well that explains the weird birthday present that Mara bought me now earlier we looked at human beings attempts to become more robotic but there's a whole lot of research that's attempting to make robots more human it's not actually taking place at a robot art school like this but it's nice I think it might be isn't there is a long way to go in robotics just picking up all those weirdly shaped everyday objects is still an enormous challenge requiring a robot to recognize a given object and to decide how exactly to pick it up but a team at Berkeley says that Dex nap here is the most effective picker-upper ever seen we're not playing with Lego it's being taught and building up a huge database of 3d objects by its masters when something new comes along it uses its 3d sensor to compare it to this list it then uses its neural network to figure out the best way to grasp it and it is said to get it right nearly all the time the springy legs of this creature were 3d printed at UC San Diego they're designed to be able to more easily traverse difficult environments such as disaster areas and as we know even walking on flat surfaces is still an issue for most robots well I say ouch but because these things don't feel pain that said there are those of us who are asking whether even feelings might one day be part other one BOTS mind at the simplest level it makes sense robots are pretty expensive you don't want them to run really nearly into fire and acid and toxic substances but at a more complex level we're looking ahead to the time when robots might interact with those on a more personal level as companion robots the elderly for those who are sick or in pain and perhaps maybe they need to understand the similar sort of experience and perhaps develop something like what we call empathy pain is not just about us saying ouch there's an emotional element for this as well as now I get quite upset when I get hurt so are we actually talking about programming some kind of emotions into artificial intelligence what we don't really understand what emotions are in human beings like so you might assume there's some sort of phenomena that occurs around incidents like pain so hypothetically if we develop systems that works like pain might emotion develop at the back of earth as well and there are those robots that do look so lifelike the Boston Dynamics big dog and the walking robots we actually feel quite sorry for them when when they pulled over or even when we've seen a beam kicks I've seen when those videos were released online the reaction was like I know you're bullying them don't hurt them they don't at this stage have that technology at all as there's no suggestion they do feel pain but the human reaction is what I'm really interested in and so is that going to inform how we behave towards robots in the future is that where you're looking at applying sympathy's yeah I mean I think the science fiction model of the human-like entity is probably not all that realistic though there may be more kind of cute models we've seen already of robots that sort of pull on our heartstrings in a more childlike way and there's those that suggest that we shouldn't have anything that looks human-like at all because it's disingenuous it's cheating and it's tricking us into treating them like they're human beings or other beings dr. Zigler thinks that appearing to feel pain may make us treat robots with a bit more respect of course what many people are worried about is how much respect the robots will have for us and most of all our jobs last week caterpillar invested several million in this Australian automated building company now robots can build houses at the rate of a thousand bricks an hour ambition in the area is huge and for the first time out of the lab eth in switzerland is working on much more ambitious structures like this undulating wall which has been largely built by robots now an increasingly robotic workforce raises a number of issues and along with the worry of what jobs will actually be left to us in the future there is another one fewer workers earning a wage means fewer workers paying income tax on their earnings and that means less money going into the economy now some tech brains including that of Bill Gates are calling for a robot tax to counter that and Kat Hawkins went to find out how that might work almost everyone in the world who works pays tax on the money they earn but at this restaurant in San Francisco there are no waiting staff and robots plates assumed that work is currently not taxable and politician Jane King is now looking into how this is changing their city's economy so what we're saying is that for automation that you people in order to deliver a product maybe prefer and more affordably but it's one of the questions that we have is true this is really convenient but it will cost and it's not just restaurants this picture is now seen across the city from hotels and hospitals to the latest addition to the autonomous family self-driving cars and policymakers have noticed every time a robot takes a human job potential tax revenue is being lost the research is showing us that jobs are going to get lost over the next 10 years and if before the Great Depression we could have predicted what would come afterwards if government could have prepared for the job loss that occurred wouldn't we do that and that is the level at which we are looking at potentially over the next 10 years in terms of job loss for this country estimations of how many jobs will be wiped out vary widely from study to study but the recent reports especially has stuck in Jane's mind it's estimated that robots will replace 37 percent of jobs in the United States by the early 2013 so the biggest concern is master displacement lack of true meaningful high wage work we're already seeing a decrease of that in San Francisco where we have the fastest growing income gap in the country and a wealth gap that is akin to the country of Rwanda according to our own Human Services Agency data and so we have a shrinking middle class and we have this growing imminent threat that many of our meaningful working class and even middle-class jobs may go away to robots and automation at Cafe X again a human worker has been replaced by a robot an Americano with milk verifier over now the human has a different role advising on coffee beans and showing customers how to use the tablet to operate the robot barista the owner is not sure about the idea of the tack on the replacement identified a little odd because you know what robot supposed to do is to increase productivity and that means it allows a shift in labor from doing highly repetitive low productivity path to more useful thing it's not about eliminating people actually we have quite a big team so in order to have this machine operate it has to be a lot of Engineers on software hardware and I'm factoring to go chamille like this just like this require training and also supervisor Kim wants attacks to help bring about if you are a childcare worker or your in-home Support Services worker working with a senior or an individual with disability you often want three or four hours a day and you make minimum wage so one of the ideas was why not tax robots and invest in these poverty jobs and make them truly living wage careers for people this would mean a robot tax potentially subsidizing low paying but essential jobs so that the human employees would earn a living wage currently many people are working but not earning enough to live leading several politicians around the world to float the idea of a universal basic income this would be expensive for governments and supervisor Kim is suggesting and automation tax could be a solution if this one thing that San Francisco is known for is leading the conversation on technology and innovation but it's harder and harder questions are asked about automation and what this really means to people's jobs it seems appropriate that this city which is added so much to the problem is also grappling with what could be the solution but the rise of robotic workers is playing out on a global scale and San Francisco is not the only place trying to lead the conversation in the EU a proposal to tax robots was voted down earlier in the year and one of the commissioners who did so says robots will create more jobs not reduce them they're worried before so they say robots sir they would take their jobs but I believe in progress Peugeot has always created more jobs than progress used to destroy train is moving and speed is high and now this is up to us to be on that train or to stay and to wave to leaving train concerns about automation replacing human jobs has been felt since the Industrial Revolution and more recently workers in the manufacturing industry have seen jobs disappear as automation takes hold and as the issue of a robot tacks begins to spread further a fundamental question still needs to be answered what even is automation in context of robots of course automation is is much broader and we have to find this definition we or they gave this definition more than 100 years ago politicians can no longer ignore the robots creeping into the workplace and while many of the big questions are still being thrashed out it's clear that the issue of robot workers is becoming more and more of a political one [Music] yeah really interesting issues aren't they that was cat walking and that's it for this week you can follow us on Twitter at BBC click throughout the week and like us on Facebook too that's it for now though thanks for watching and we will see you soon [Music]

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 68,512

Rating: 4.8002272 out of 5

Keywords: bbc, bbc click, bbc news, eyeborg, bionics, mit, virginia tech, robots, androids, berkley, san diego, uc san diego, tax, robot tax, san francisco, eu, europe, bionic man

Id: MD21REQ6RbQ

Length: 24min 27sec (1467 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 31 2017